Category: Feature

It is the night of Jan. 19, 2017. The next day, the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, will be inaugurated. A student walks through TPHS’ west quad, silently weaving in and out of the mottled shadows of the English building. The only lights abound from the orange incandescent bulbs above the lunch tables and the distant neon signs of the Del Mar Highlands. The student approaches a green electric box and slides his phone out of his pocket. In one hand, the perpetrator holds a photo from Google Images. In the other, a white graffiti marker pen. The artist looks back to the photo before to carefully traci...

Three office buildings, four floors and three hours after accepting what seemed to be a simple task, Elaine Song (12) has a gathered all the needed signatures for a bill on Pell Grants. Her feet are aching, and the decision to wear black heels seems like a mistake, but she had not expected it to be easy.
Song spent a month of her summer in Washington D.C. interning with San Diego Congresswoman Susan Davis, the representative of California’s 53rd District.
“I helped them sort emails that they got from their constituents,” Song said. “I ran documents to the Capitol Building for bi...

It was a quiet day. The squad car ambled down the road with its windows down, sirens off, music playing softly in the background. The police radio let out a short, static sound interrupting the calm; it was a report of an individual armed with a gun, in the middle of a street close to the cop car. The music disappeared, the windows went up and the sirens blared as the car picked up speed.
The tales of police always begin the same: a cop involved in a shooting, a person, injured or dead, sparks an investigation. Police shootings affect everybody involved: the individual, his or her family, bystanders, witnes...

by Farhan HossainJune IssueComments Off on Let’s Break It Down: North Korea Tension

In 2010, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea openly declared its possession of a nuclear weapon. The isolated Asian nation, lead by dictator Kim Jong-un, has dedicated itself to expanding the size and precision of its nuclear program. The nation’s weapons serve as a protection against the threat of regime change brought by the U.S., its greatest enemy. North Korea has strong reason to believe the U.S. State-controlled North Korean media regularly delivers warnings to Japan and South Korea, two economic and diplomatic allies with the U.S. Also, both Amnesty International and the United Nations have dubbed K...

She takes a deep breath. In, out. In. Out. She reviews the piece mentally, ensuring that her solo piece is memorized, the notes ingrained in her mind. She then steps onto the stage. While everything is memorized, it will not stop her from doubting her every passage.
Erica Hwang (11) was accepted into the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, or NYO-USA, a youth orchestra organized by Carnegie Hall Weill Institute, in February. For now, she waits for July 1, when she will arrive at the residence hall at the State University of New York, or SUNY, at Purchase, where she will practice the pieces she wil...

Every other Thursday, a group of about eight girls gathers in an otherwise empty classroom to scarf down lunch before starting to use the F-word.
But how much chit-chat can be made on the topic of one single word?
“They make judgements about who you are by just this one word alone,” Gabi Gonzalez (12) said.
She and Zoe Catz Johnson (12) serve as co-presidents of a TPHS club dedicated to the F-word. They facilitate those bimonthly meetings so that club members can have a place to voice their opinions around like-minded people.
No, this is not a forum for etymology enthu...

After meeting on a blind date in Mexico City and getting engaged only three weeks later, Pepe and Deborah Stepensky packed up their belongings and moved to San Diego to pursue new careers, unsure of what their lives would be like in a completely foreign place. Decades before, Deborah’s father traveled to Venezuela, a country he had never set foot in, after being rescued from a concentration camp during the Holocaust in Poland. Their own forays into the unfamiliar led to more opportunities and better lives for Pepe, Deborah, and Deborah’s father.
According to Pepe, the Stepenskys became the third family to own the Po...

In her sophomore year, Grace Lee (12) was frustrated by trying to select a topic for her English classes’ research paper. But, Lee was regularly engaged in Korean culture and media, having moved from South Korea at age 11. Headlines about comfort women, a euphemism for Korean sex slaves who were used by the Japanese army during World War II, sparked outrage in Lee, who decided to further research the topic for her essay. After writing her English essay, Lee still felt connected to the topic and wanted to take her advocacy further.
“As I got older I became more aware of social problems,” Lee said...